Janey in Pink and White Dress, William Matthew Prior, 1840

A baby who is past infancy and able to crawl and explore is typically a very busy person. He has important things to do.

The small world he inhabits is a university to him. He is the teacher; the people around him are useful too. But his main daily preoccupation, his subject matter, is things. The physical world is made up of many different substances and mechanisms. His job is to understand them. That’s why he wants to touch things, put them in his mouth, knock them over, bang them on the floor, throw them, push their buttons, examine them from all sides with his hands. He wants to understand and see how things work. Fortunately, he does not yet possess language. If he did, words would interfere with his studies. They would get in the way of his absorption with objects as they are. This brief, pre-verbal phase is extremely important in his mental development.

The baby is not capable of conceptual thinking. But still he acquires an important philosophical premise early on through all this investigations. He is mostly a scientist, but he starts to become a philosopher too.

As he is testing the physical universe for himself, he quickly comes to see that his environment follows certain regular laws. You might say, this is what all his experiments are about — the acquisition of this knowledge, without which he could not move forward.

He acquires an intimate understanding of gravity, for instance — better than any lesson conveyed to him in words could be, when he throws a ball repeatedly at the stairs, and it rolls down the stairs. Over and over again, it does the same thing. The baby knows. He’s tried it! When he pushes the small table, it falls to the ground. When he tries to stand, he falls down. After many experiments, the baby realizes he can know how things work because they work consistently. The world is rational and orderly. This is his great finding. He realizes that he can understand. He can know. The reason why he can understand and know is not just because of what is within him, his subjective condition; it is because of what is outside him.  He does not doubt that the toy in front of him is going to feel the same as it did yesterday, or wonder whether it is just a figment of his imagination. He is certain it is real. Therefore he can move around confidently. He can know what is before him.

Imagine if the physical world did not follow consistent laws. Let’s say, one time he threw the ball toward the stairs, and it reversed direction and flew behind him. Let’s say another time, he threw the ball toward the stairs and it flew up and hit the ceiling — and another time he threw it, and it disappeared into thin air altogether. Apply this inconsistency to everything before him and, no matter how bright he might be, he would be so exhausted, the world would be so astounding, the mechanics so unknowable, that after a while he would cease to be curious altogether. Curiosity presupposes order. He would still play perhaps, but his interest would wane. If we lived with such inconsistency, of course, none of us could function. But also none of us would care. There would be no scientists. There would be nothing to learn, no possibility of mastery.

The baby is pulled into the stream of things around him precisely because they adhere to rational and orderly laws. He knows he can be an agent in this small world because it is predictable.

It is not, you might say, just a physical lesson the baby is acquiring. He is acquiring a metaphysical lesson. The sheer fact of consistency becomes clear. This immediate knowledge of order is surely one reason why little children are so confident of metaphysical order too.

When a baby grows up and becomes a citizen of the modern world, he can still move around with the same confidence in the physical world.

But sadly a major development occurs in his theory of knowledge when it comes to the metaphysical order.  In that realm, he is taught that he cannot know. He is taught a universal skepticism. The smarter he is, the worse it typically is, the more he imbibes a radical skepticism and doubts the very existence of objective truth. Everything becomes subjective. The idea itself is a personal event. What someones believes may be true and right for him, but it is not necessarily true and right for others. That is the legacy of the modern philosophers. Objective truth is not certain.

The baby thus is wise where the grown man is not.

The latter cannot move around with confidence in the immaterial world — the world of ideas. He is reduced to the state of a baby in a world of chaos — the ball flinging toward the ceiling or flying out the window or vanishing altogether. He often loses the ability to explore with his mind — otherwise known as thinking — because he has lost the ability to know. The baby with his conviction of order is better off than him. No one can be wise who does not believe in the ability to know objective truths.

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